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Damm well time you got down to real issues SE, I am glad to see you posting with such force and tact. You will bring down the house with this thread.

Compar and I were talking about this very thing in another thread right here on DP, maybe you can find it or Compar will find it. But is was mentioned in one of the SEO Software companies newsletters also a couple of weeks ago.

Bob has a lot more knowledge on all of this than me or a lot of others, so I guess we will have to wait for the "old man to get up" and add to this.

I agree with all most everything you say. As Anthony suggests I've been preaching the "it's not about PR" message for a very long time. I don't have one particular thread on this forum or the IMR forum to suggest, but if you do a little searching I'm sure you can find lots of threads where I have preached this message.

However you make one statement that I totally disagree with:

Better still you don't have to recripricate (which I am 95% sure makes links pretty useless)...

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There is absolutely no evidence or reason to think this. A link is a link is a link. I simply do not believe that Google completely crawls the target site in full to check for reciprocation before evaluating the link.

Think about the time and computing power to do that. Let say I have 300 outbound links on a site. These lead to 300 other sites, which average 100 pages each, with an average of only 10 outbound links per page. Under this scenario you are suggesting that Google is going to crawl 30,000 pages and assess 300,000 links before they decide what value to apply to my 300 OBLs.

Yeah Bob, a link is a link is a link, many "so called SEO experts" say that linking to be linking is bad (link farms, buying and selling high PR Links and many other scams like Blog nests) so just gaining thousands of links may not be good, what if the sites linking to you are proven to be link farms and you are penalized along with them when they are taken down?

It is the quality of links that matter, not the amount of links.

I think that with all of the "Unknown ALGO changes" designed to THWART SEO's efforts by Google, some of the things that may have worked well last week, may be the worst thing in the world in the next update.

Who said Google liked "so called SEO experts" anyway, I always thought Google viewed them as the enemy. When did they kiss and make up with the SEO community?

From what I have seen in the past, and having spoken to various SEO's, recriprocal linking is not as beneficial (and in my opinion not at all)...

Compar...

In another thread (I think it was you that said this) You mentioned that the number of backlinks have been going steadily down after each update...

How many of those were recriprocal? (as I say, I might be wrong about this)...

Google crawls the sites you link to... It crawls your site... Therefore, it knows that you link to eachother. The bots don't have to investigate this in its own right... As a bi-product of spidering sites, Google knows who links to who, then stores it in a database or whatever it is...

Google is in a constant state of trying to filter out spamming... Whatever way you look at it, recriprocal link exchanges (or any link exchange to speak of) is technically spamming (ie- trying to artificially alter the SERP's)...

Google clearly tries to find a way of stopping the spam techniques used by various SEO's and Professional spammers alike...

The easiest way for them to do this in regard to links, is to look a who links to who and slowly filter out those who are clearly participating in a link exchange...

SEBASIC, to try to figure out what Google is doing is science, most of this is discovered after the fact.

You do not know what Google will do with the ALGO's next week, since the ALGO's are secret, this is why OPEN SOURCE search engines are going to give these closed source engines a run for their money down the road.

One day all of this SPY vs SPY (Google vs SEO's) will come to an end with the demise of "PAGE RANK" or "WEB RANK" which are maketing gimmicks for these companies to collect data on page views.

Sure you do. You are talking to one of them right now. I sell links, and so do many members of this type of forums.

From what I have seen in the past, and having spoken to various SEO's, recriprocal linking is not as beneficial (and in my opinion not at all)...

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Well you may just have been talking to people who are wrong. Look at your original message. You said PR is of little value. If I didn't agree with you, think of how many SEOs I could claim to have talked to that would support that position. So that is a completely meaningless justification of your point.

Compar...

In another thread (I think it was you that said this) You mentioned that the number of backlinks have been going steadily down after each update...

How many of those were recriprocal? (as I say, I might be wrong about this)...

Click to expand...

Well it just so happens that the site I was talking about is a site with 100% purchased or inbound links. The most stable site I have, and one that is holding it's place in the top ten on Googles SERPs for several keyword phrases, happens to be using reciprocal links extensively.

Google crawls the sites you link to... It crawls your site... Therefore, it knows that you link to eachother. The bots don't have to investigate this in its own right... As a bi-product of spidering sites, Google knows who links to who, then stores it in a database or whatever it is...

Click to expand...

Possible, but that is one hell of a big database. Google has about 6 billion pages indexed. If each page only has 10 links that is 60 billion links in their database. You suggesting that every time it finds a new link it references the 60 billion entries in the database to see if there are any links from the target domain pointing back at the linking domain. I don't believe it.

Google is in a constant state of trying to filter out spamming... Whatever way you look at it, recriprocal link exchanges (or any link exchange to speak of) is technically spamming (ie- trying to artificially alter the SERP's)...

Click to expand...

That's the most outrageous statement yet in this debate. That is absolutely ridiculous. The internet is founded on links and many many of these are reciprocating. If you and I both write research papers on some esoteric subject and I reference something on your web site and you reference something on my web site, without discussion or collusion, are we spamming the search engines?

Shawn has links under QuickLinks to other SEO tools web sites. They probably have links back to his tool site. Are those spamming?

When I first discovered Shawn's keyword tracking tool and others I was so impressed that I put a link to them from one of my SEO articles in my InfoPool. Then just a couple of posts ago I put up a link for you to follow to my InfoPool. So is digitalpoint.com spamming Google now?

Google clearly tries to find a way of stopping the spam techniques used by various SEO's and Professional spammers alike...

The easiest way for them to do this in regard to links, is to look a who links to who and slowly filter out those who are clearly participating in a link exchange...

Click to expand...

Artifical link exchanges possibly, but not all link exchanges. The problem they have is how to identify artifical link exchanges from valid link exchanges, and they are always going to error on the side of caution.

Bob you still have not answered my question, what if you are penalized for links that are discovered to be from link farms or sites that have been banned for spamming the search index, if they are taken down, like ZEEZO was from Yahoo.

If you are linked extensively from these sorts of sites, are all links still good links in your opinion?

That's the most outrageous statement yet in this debate. That is absolutely ridiculous. The internet is founded on links and many many of these are reciprocating. If you and I both write research papers on some esoteric subject and I reference something on your web site and you reference something on my web site, without discussion or collusion, are we spamming the search engines?

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Why is that rediculous...

I understand that the web is founded on links (As I am sure most people realise)... I dont disput that Google understands this either...

What Google also understands however, is that SOME links are spam...

It needs to try and find some way of eliminating those spammy links does it not?

The only point that I am trying to make, is that one of the easiest ways that Google can tell which links are "spam" (in the loosest sense of the word) is to look at which ones will recriprocate..

You said yourself...

The problem they have is how to identify artifical link exchanges from valid link exchanges, and they are always going to error on the side of caution.

Because PR is expodential, it makes it very hard to judge how popular a site is in terms link popularity... a link from a PR 7 site may give you a PR6, while 400 links from PR2 sites may only give you a PR4 (maybe more, maybe less, but you see where I am going with this)...

So, which makes you more popular, the High PR links or the low PR links?

I totally agree with Shawn. I also agree w/ Dominic. It think pr is pretty meaningless. Heck, my own personal site that has no content other than a home page, has a pr of 4. Don't ask me how. I only have one or two obsure links to the site on a couple of my other sites.

I've done pretty good in the backlinks dept, but I'm always trying to find ways to get more. I think the links are the big key to getting my site top serps once the pages are optimized.

I'd just like to note that I completely agree with compar: reciprical links do help, and they help quite a bit.

why would google want to punish them? think about it; just because two quality sites link to each other doesn't mean they aren't quality sites. in fact, it usually means quite the opposite: quality sites are rarely willing to link to poor sites.

a quality inbound from a quality site is definitely a good thing, and it definitely payed for us. we have around 10 "affiliate sites" that all link to each other and are all fairly popular in our category, and it's helped us a huge amount in the serps.